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Monday, 8 October 2012

Some forthcoming conferences

Love, Desire and Melancholy: Inspired by the Writings of Constance Maynard

Centre for the History of the Emotions SymposiumQueen Mary, University of London

Date: 6th November 2012

The Centre for the History of the Emotions and Queen Mary, University of London Archives invite you to a symposium to explore love, desire, melancholy and religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These themes are inspired by the personal experiences described in the autobiographical writings of Constance Maynard (1849-1935), which were recently digitised.

Constance Maynard was a pioneer in higher education for women. She was also a prolific writer, whose personal writings cover over 40 years of her life and touch on topics such as her role in Westfield College, her devout Christian faith, her close friendships with other women and her attempts to understand her emotions.

Key Note Speakers

Professor Seth Koven, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University, The Match Girl and the Heiress: Christian Revolution and Languages of Love Between Women in the London Slums.

Professor Pauline Phipps, University of Windsor, Constance Maynard’s Atonement: The Passions of an English Educational Pioneer (1849-1935).

Other Speakers

Professor Laura Doan, The University of Manchester, Constance Maynard and the Historiography of Sexuality.

Constance Maynard’s experience of love, desire, melancholy, and religion are recorded in her personal writings, which are the inspiration for the themes explored in the symposium.

Constance Maynard’s personal writings include her ‘Green Book’ diaries written between 1866 and 1834, in which she describes her ‘inner life’, and an unpublished autobiography, written in her latter years in the style of a reflective diary.

Recent popular campaigns in South Asia designed to highlight and root out corruption at both the local and national level show that the subject of `justice´, fairness and equitable treatment, remain a pressing issue. South Asian women´s social, cultural, religious and economic position has also repeatedly been identified since the eighteenth century as an area particularly deserving of attention. This has led to a thriving women´s movement, as well as problematic colonial notions of `eternally oppressed South Asian women´ that are still used as a symbol to justify a plethora of conservative viewpoints in the West.

This international and multidisciplinary conference will explore the manifold ways in which the ideas of gender and justice have been approached in South Asia and in the South Asian Diaspora since 1757. Its aim is to foster dialogue between scholars from different fields and to provide an historical dimension to contemporary issues and debates around the broad themes of gender, sexuality and justice. Papers which have a transnational and/orcomparative focus between countries in South Asia and elsewhere in the world are particularly welcome.

2013 marks the 40-year anniversary of the vote by the members of the American Psychiatric Association to remove ‘homosexuality’ from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). 2013 is also the publication date of the fifth edition of the DSM.

To mark this anniversary and this event, the History and Philosophy Section have themed the 2013 conference 'DSM: The History, Theory, and Politics of Diagnosis.'

For further information, expressions of interest, etc. please email g.bunn@mmu.ac.uk

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About Me

Retired former archivist at the Wellcome Library: now a Wellcome Library Research Fellow, and Honorary Senior Lecturer, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London: also a historian who has published several books and numerous articles and chapters on issues to do with sexuality and gender in the UK in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has subsidiary interests in the history of women in science and medicine, interwar middlebrow women novelists, and science fiction and fantasy. She considers herself a feminist.
Twitter @erinacean